


Clean Margins

by spiderfire



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Choices, Drugs, Gen, Hydra (Marvel), Marvel Technology, Mentions of Cancer, Missing Scene, Pre-HYDRA Reveal, SHIELD, Villains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-09 17:33:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4358105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiderfire/pseuds/spiderfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Washington Post: <b>Over 100 killed in fire</b></p><p>At least 89 children, 14 staff and volunteers and 3 emergency workers were killed in a fire that spread rapidly through the Broad Street Boys and Girls Club yesterday.  Police and fire investigators have not yet identified a cause of the five alarm fire. </p><p>Last night, even as firefighters worked to contain the blaze, over five thousand gathered in front of Norfolk City Hall for a tearful candlelight vigil.  Mayor Alice Chan pledged the community's resources in the recovery.  Reverend Michael Kennedy of First Baptist Church also spoke, saying, "In the wake of this tragedy we will rally together, we will fight the evils of poverty and drug abuse, we will support the families who lost loved ones.  From the ashes of this tragedy, a flower of great beauty will bloom." </p><p>Services are expected to ...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clean Margins

**February, 2008**

Jasper Sitwell sat at his desk in the empty bull pen. This bull pen was a large room with some dozen desks arranged in clumps of three, four or five. As high-tech an agency as SHIELD was, there was still a lot of paper around the room. File folders were stacked on the corners of desks, sticky notes were affixed to the edges of computer screens and much to the perpetual annoyance of Rayshawn, the science specialist for their group, even the holo-table often wound up as a horizontal filing surface. 

On the wall behind the holotable, SHIELD’s logo was embossed in the smooth wood wall. Beneath the logo it said, “Inter-Agency Task Force” in large block letters. And that was the reason for the paper. Other task forces within SHIELD called them luddites, but no matter how cutting edge SHIELD’s tech was, when the IATF was called into consult with a local police force, or even a national agency, the other agency almost always handed them paper files, and when SHIELD left, they had to leave a paper trail for the prosecutor. 

Sitwell was not working. He was turned sideways to his desk and he held a tablet propped up on his knees. From time to time he flicked the screen with his thumb. The small motions were not enough to trigger the motion sensors that controlled the lights in the room. A while ago the lights had dimmed, leaving just a few half powered for the security cameras. 

Abruptly the lights switched on and Sitwell looked up. Secretary Pierce was standing in the doorway to the bull pen. 

He recognized Alexander Pierce, of course. He had even spoken to him once a few years ago at a big party celebrating SHIELD’s sixty years of service. He had never once seen Pierce down here, in the trenches. 

Uncertainly, Sitwell flicked the tablet off and he leaned forward to stand. Peirce waved his hand as he walked across the empty room, “No, please, sit,” he said. 

Sitwell set the tablet aside and leaned back. Pierce looked over his desk – empty except for the terminals and the tablet. Unlike the desks around it, there was no paper, or pictures, or personal artifacts of any kind on Sitwell’s desk. Pierce looked back at Sitwell and offered his hand. “Alexander Pierce,” he said. 

Sitwell hesitated a moment before reaching out and shaking the hand. “Jasper Sitwell,” he replied. 

Pierce studied him. Sitwell found himself sitting up straighter, fidgeting with his tie, tightening it. He had loosened it an hour ago after everyone else had left. Pierce gestured towards another agent’s desk chair. “May I?” 

Sitwell blinked. “Uh, sure, sir.” 

Pierce turned the chair around and sat on its edge. “Why aren’t you out celebrating with your team?” he asked. “You had a big victory, today.” 

Sitwell looked away from Pierce, glancing the blank screen of the tablet. Then he looked back at Pierce. “If you say so, uh, sir.” 

“Your task force, the task force you founded, brought down a major drug distribution network today. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives won’t be ruined by, what are they called? Glow-ees?” 

“Glowbies is its street name.” Sitwell supplied impassively. “Quantum tesseract exchange or QTX is what the docs call it.” 

“I’d say that’s a major achievement.” 

Sitwell looked at Pierce. 

“And you caught the distributor. Any word on how they got access to tesseract energy?” 

Sitwell shook his head, “Not yet.” After a long moment he added, “I met you once before, sir, at the sixtieth anniversary party. You probably don’t remember.” 

The skin around the corners of Pierce’s eyes creased and he dropped his chin as he sat back in his chair, looking at Sitwell over the top of his glasses. “Really?” 

Sitwell nodded, not sure what else to say. He kept thinking about his sister. He had been working in law enforcement long enough – five years in the FBI before joining SHIELD, and now five years in SHIELD – that he thought that crime scene photos did not bother him anymore. However, he’d never seen photos of someone he knew. Rose had been a fuck-up, no two ways about that, but she did not deserve what she got. 

Goddamnit, what was the point of it all? It didn’t matter what he did. It was not enough. It was never enough. 

Suddenly he realized that Pierce was still sitting a foot away from him, watching him and he had no idea how much time had passed. “I’m sorry,” he said abruptly. “What were you saying?” 

Pierce shook his head. “I wasn’t. I asked you why you weren’t out celebrating with your task force today and you mentioned that we had met before. Bit of a non-sequitur.” 

Despite himself, Sitwell chuckled. The sound was dark and grim. “That pretty much describes my day.” 

Pierce leaned forward, his eyes never leaving Sitwell’s face. Coming to an abrupt decision, he stood. “Would you come with me, Agent Sitwell? I have something I’d like you to see.” 

Startled, Sitwell blinked. “Sir?” The last thing he wanted to do right now was follow his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, or whatever he was, out the door. He wanted to be alone until he had to go pick up his parents from the airport. They were flying back from some conference in Mexico City. Sitwell did not know if this was his mother’s conference or his father’s. Not that it mattered. The plane was landing in four hours. 

Pierce started walking towards the door, winding his way between the desks. When Sitwell did not immediately follow, Pierce paused and looked back. “It’s your choice, Agent.” 

However, Sitwell was curious. What could have brought Secretary Peirce down to the bull pens? To talk to him? What could Secretary Pierce possibly have to show him? Him, of all people. He was only Level 4 and the number of agents between him and, well, whatever it took to be Secretary was mindboggling. Curiosity and ambition got the better of him and with a weary sigh, Sitwell pushed himself to his feet. “I’m coming sir.” 

At the elevator, Pierce said, “Give me your badge.” Puzzled, Sitwell pulled the badge from a pocket inside his suit jacket and handed it to Pierce. Once the elevator doors closed, Pierce waved his own badge at the reader and pressed the button for floor 28 tower 3. The screen scanned his fingerprint and flashed green. Floor 28 tower 3 was a section of the Triskelion Sitwell had never been in before. He had no idea what was done there. Then Pierce scanned Sitwell’s badge. The screen blinked yellow with an alert that Level 7 clearance was required for access. Pierce pressed the override button and laid his hand flat on the screen. A second later, the screen flashed green. Pierce handed the badge back to Sitwell. 

“It will be such a relief when they work the bugs out of the biometrics,” Pierce commented as Sitwell tucked the badge back in his pocket.

Sitwell frowned still staring at the screen that had said Level 7 access was required. He was not even sure he had ever met a Level 7 agent before. 

The glass wall of the elevator showed the glowing city lights as they zipped up, then sideways and then back down. Pierce leaned against the wall and said, “Have you ever been to the Map Room?” 

Images from Indiana Jones flashed through Sitwell’s head and he tried to imagine a SHIELD room made of stone with a crystal staff and a beam of light. Well, the crystal staff, maybe. Pushing that thought aside, he shook his head. “No sir. What is the Map Room?” 

“Generally, I’d go in there with a whole slew of research specialists. Manipulating the interface can be very delicate.” The lift slowed to a halt and the doors opened. Sitwell, who was facing Pierce and had his back to the doors turned around. “Welcome to the Map Room,” Pierce said. 

The room was just an empty space, bigger than the IATF’s bull pen, but not by much. There was a single desk. A balding, somewhat pudgy man dressed in khakis and a polo shirt sat at the desk, his feet propped up and a tablet balanced on his knees. A researcher, Sitwell concluded from his physique and attire. The man looked up as they entered and scrambled to his feet. 

“Good evening, Mr. Pierce and, uh…” 

Pierce glanced at Sitwell and then at the researcher. “I think we will skip names for now.” Sitwell looked between the two of them, wondering what was going on. Pierce caught Sitwell’s eye and continued. “I am going to show you something that you may find interesting.” Pierce looked back at the researcher. “Like we talked about,” he ordered. 

The man picked up the tablet and suddenly Sitwell was standing in the middle of a glowing blue web. The web was three dimensional. Over his head and off to the right was a clump, a nexus, where hundreds, perhaps thousands of lines converged into a knotted tangle. Another nexus was at his waist level off to his left. Spinning slowly around, he saw that there were maybe a couple dozen such clumpings. 

He realized that the web was not static. Tiny pulses travelled along the lines, occasionally bursting to form a new clump. Lines emanated from the walls and snaked out into the room to join the web. Individual lines slowly twisted and tangled around each other, occasionally coming undone and finding something else to tangle around. Even the lines, he realized, were braided, twisting masses of many lines. It was mesmerizing. But why had Pierce brought him here? “What is it?” he asked. 

The researcher answered. “This is the world wide web. Not in the mundane form that most people would know. This is every bit of human knowledge that has been digitized run through an…uh…expert system that finds the connections between the them. Far simpler models have, for example, been used to show the connections between el Nino phases and political instability in extratropical nations. Or, my favorite,” the researcher rolled his eyes, “carbon emissions and global climate. This,” the researcher waved his hand, “can show you the connections between anything.”

Sitwell frowned looking at Pierce. Pierce just gestured back at the researcher. The researcher continued. “In this form, it is pretty but nothing more. But watch. I am going to apply some filters.” Suddenly, vast sections of the web faded out and the lines that were left stretched and reformed, merging into a different configuration with new nexuses. There were around a dozen clumps now and each clump was mostly one color. “This is yesterday, filtered on current events. The colors are by continent. Red for North America, yellow for South America, green for Europe, and so on.” Suddenly they were zooming into one of the red blobs. Lines became braids, twisted around each other, what looked like one big blob revealed itself to be thousands of tiny knots. Individual blue or yellow or green threads tangled into the red mass. 

“I don’t understand how this is useful,” Sitwell said. 

“What are you working on?” the researcher asked.

Sitwell looked at Pierce and Pierce nodded. “QTX,” Sitwell said cautiously. 

The researcher tapped on the tablet and some lines brightened and many others dimmed, still visible but in the background. Tiny labels appeared on the lines. “The bright lines are all information about QTX.”

Sitwell took a step forward toward the biggest clump. As he moved around the room, his body formed a wake in the weblines. In the space in front of him, they were pressed and stretched around him, a sea of red lines with yellow and green and blue interspersed, but they were just light and they did not impede his motion forward. When he stopped moving, they broke and reformed, snapping back into place. 

He found the line for Horace Rumsfield and saw how it tangled with the lieutenants they had arrested plus a few more they had not. He found the clump for his home town, Norfolk, where the bust had gone done and saw how the entire eastern seaboard was connected by Horace’s distribution network, even cities like Louisville and Cleveland that he had not known about. 

The researcher then said, “You are looking at yesterday. Now watch.” The lines became animated, moving about until suddenly, things began to rapidly change. Two thick ropes slid on scene, one labeled Norfolk Police and the other labeled SHIELD and they wrapped themselves around the bright knot of QTX. Horace’s line, and his lieutenants’ faded, untangling from the cities, wrapping themselves up into a dim ball. While there were still a few of the bolded QTX lines left, there was a vast void. 

Sitwell looked at Pierce and then back at the simulation. “A good day’s work,” Pierce commented. For a moment, Sitwell forgot about his sister and felt the pride in the work they had done. It was good work. 

Pierce glanced at the researcher and said, “Run the last 12 hours again, expand here.” Pierce gestured at what seemed like a random spot on the web. 

Sitwell again felt that he was falling into the clump as the simulation zoomed in. The threads were tiny now, tendrils of bright red in a vast sea of dimmer red. “The lines are now individual people,” the researcher said. “This data here comes from traffic cameras, ATM cameras, cell phones, social media and so on, all cross-referenced and indexed.” 

It took Sitwell a moment to understand that he was now seeing the life of the city as people went about their lives, interacting with each other and their surroundings. The tiny bright lines, he realized, were individual QTX dealers and users. As he watched, a bright line briefly tangled with a dim line and the dim line turned bright. “Wait,” Sitwell said. “There, show me again?” The researcher tapped the tablet and again he watched. “Oh my god. Is that someone who took QTX and got hooked?” 

The researcher nodded. “Biometrics off the cameras when appropriately filtered can infer…” 

Sitwell shook his head in amazement. “This is incredible.” He turned to Pierce. “Why is this Level 7? Why can’t we use this in our investigations?”

“It’s inadmissible.” Pierce replied. “The tech that makes this room work…I well, we have whole research groups devoted to making it work and mining it for patterns. We have tried to get warrants from evidence gathered on the Map, but the rulings have been clear. Not only is the Map not admissible, but it’s fruit of the poison tree. If we start from here, any evidence we gather is also inadmissible.” 

Turning back to the simulation, watching as another line dim line brightened and become hooked on QTX, Sitwell frowned. Damn that stuff was addictive. One or maybe two doses was all it took, the scientists told him. But watching it action, as individual people were infected…This tool was so powerful. Already he had half a dozen new names to investigate. And he couldn’t even use the information. 

A single line caught his eye. It was labeled ‘Rose Sitwell’. It couldn’t be. No. 

Pierce was still speaking. He was saying, “It took judges decades to accept DNA evidence. Did you know that last year, four men were executed even though the DNA had exonerated them? “

As Sitwell watched, half a dozen bright lines briefly tangled around Rose and she was caught in the middle of it. When the tangle unraveled, her line was gone. Eyes wide, he felt the tears collect and he blinked furiously. Goddamit. No. 

He took a step forward and said, “Run it again, please.” Despite himself, his voice cracked. And he watched the whole thing again, taking note of the names. It had just been a car accident. Hit and run, the detectives had told him. There was no evidence. But this, this… He reached out towards the spot where the Rose Sitwell line had been. She had not even been using the crap, but it had killed her nonetheless. 

“But…” 

“It gets worse,” Pierce said. Sitwell looked away from the web, rubbing his eyes and then he looked at Pierce. Pierce was watching him with a peculiar, intent look. 

Pierce glanced at the researcher. “Run it forward,” he said, his voice clipped and abrupt.

The researcher again tapped the tablet. Sitwell watched in horror as, within days, the bright red lines grew out of nowhere and everywhere to refill the void today’s arrest had made. On some level, he knew it would happen. It always happened. But watching it made him sick and the speed was mindboggling. 

“Can’t we stop it?” he asked, finally, his voice barely above a whisper. He wondered how many more men would loose their sisters, how many more parents would loose their daughters. 

Pierce leaned back against the wall, his arms crossed, watching the seething web. His pale skin took on a red hue, reflecting the bright red lines of the holograph. “My wife,” he said after a few minutes, “died a few years back, in a car accident, of all things. It was a drunk driver.” Pierce paused for a moment, staring at the web. Looking back at Sitwell, he continued. “When she was alive, she was a twenty-plus year survivor of cancer.” 

Sitwell frowned, turning towards Pierce. 

“They know a lot more about treating breast cancer, these days. Back in the late eighties when she was diagnosed, they had a whole host of new drugs. New varieties of chemotherapy. Her oncologist wanted to try one. ‘It’s early,’ he told her. ‘Let’s give this a shot first.’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Cut the cancer out.’ She insisted on a double mastectomy. The first oncologist refused to do the procedure. ‘The lump is very small, I can not justify cutting out all that healthy tissue.’ We found another oncologist. It saved her life.”

“You see,” Pierce said, “to save the my wife from her own body, the cancer had to be cut from her flesh. Aggressively. Ruthlessly. ‘Clean margins’ the oncologists call it. You cut out the cancer and then the next layer of uninfected flesh around it. The world is no different.” 

Sitwell looked from Pierce to the holographic map. The QTX lines had saturated the web and the web was unraveling, dying. 

Pierce continued, “SHIELD was founded on the principal of protection. Sometimes we protect one man from himself, sometimes we protect the planet against something only a madman could imagine. Regardless, we are driven by the belief that mankind is worth saving.” 

Sitwell nodded. He had heard this speech before, when Director Fury had spoken at his graduation from the SHIELD Academy. 

“Sometimes,” Pierce continued. Sitwell looked at him, meeting his eyes. Pierce’s voice took on a hard edge, a dangerous edge, “we need to protect mankind from a cancer within, a cancer that needs to be cut out, and to keep it from growing back we need to leave clean margins. Watch.” 

Pierce looked at the researcher. “Reset to today. Run 23.” 

The researcher nodded. Abruptly, the sea of dark red QTX lines vanished as it reset to the post-raid configuration. Pierce pointed to one spot in the map, a tangled clump hundreds dark lines with a few bright red QTX lines twisted in. “This,” Pierce said, “is the Broad Street Boys and Girls Club.” Sitwell looked up sharply. He had spent more hours there than he could count as a child. The pool had been irresistible and he had all but grown up on its basketball courts. 

“For some reason, this is the most important nexus. Watch what happens if a fire consumes the building tomorrow afternoon.” Sitwell looked at Pierce, horror causing his stomach to clench. Mid-afternoon on a weekday, the place would be packed. Hundreds of kids playing games or cheering on friends in the game room, basketball in the gym, doing crafts in the basement. Abruptly, entire knot faded out. Even the thought of it made Sitwell sick to his stomach. As the simulation ran forward he looked on in astonishment. While the QTX was not gone, even a year later, it never reestablished. Thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions of lives that would be ruined by the drug never encountered it. 

But, no. He thought of the game room, packed with kids at the foozball tables, pool tables and gathered around the large screen where Wii tournaments were held. He thought of the pool full of shrieking, laughing children. He thought of the riot of languages and colors of the kids on the basketball court or jumping doubledutch in the parking lot. The staff at Broad Street had known his name, mentored him and given him his first paying job. He turned away and put a hand on the wall. “There has to be another way,” he said, his voice breaking. 

Pierce put his hand on Sitwell’s shoulder. The grasp was heavy and warm. “Not that we’ve found. You want to try?” 

“What if we just eliminated the dealers who hang out at Broad Street?” 

“We tried that. It does not work.” 

“Show me.” 

“Run 24,” Pierce said to the researcher. 

Sitwell turned around and leaned his back against the wall as the researcher reset the room again, his gut sinking as he watched the QTX saturate the web. 

As the simulation was running, he lost focus and he thought of the time when he was fifteen and he and his father went on a motorcycle trip to the Grand Canyon. When they were out in the desert, his father had let him drive sometimes. He had puttered along feeling the wind and imagining he was racing at a million miles an hour. At one point when they had been somewhere on a dusty track on the Navaho reservation, his father had tapped his shoulder. “Pull over here,” his father had said in his ear. His father was an archeologist and he did that all the time, stopping to look at something. Reluctantly, he had pulled the bike over. With the wind of their motion stopped, the motorcycle leathers had become almost unbearably hot. He had been busy unzipping his coat as he followed his father a hundred yards off the side of the road to look at ruins that were half cave, half roofless rooms built all attached to each other in a giant cellular mass. “The people who lived here,” his father had said, “we don’t know what they called themselves but they lived from here all the way south to Coahula. At the time, these mountains were covered in trees. Giant, towering pine trees. They cut them down, to build with and to use as firewood. Within a hundred years of the trees being gone, bamn, the people were gone too. No one knows where they went, we just know that people stopped living in these all these towns, all at about the same time. A hundred thousand people, an entire civilization, wiped out by their own insatiable demand for wood.” 

“Agent Sitwell?” 

Sitwell blinked, his eyes refocusing. He thought of his sister back before she got in trouble, when she had sported freckles and dark pigtails and an infectious laugh. She had held her own on the basketball court. She could dribble the ball back and forth between her legs and she could outmaneuver every boy on the court. 

Sitwell thought of his mother, tiny and fierce. When he was young, when he had come up to his mother’s chin, they had taken a family trip to California. She had had a conference at some college and during the day he and his sister had played in the ocean with their father. One day, the four of them went to the Monterey Bay aquarium together. After a picnic lunch, she had stood behind him as they both faced the ocean, watching the seals chase each other through the waves. In her soft lilting voice, she explained the importance of seals, that even though the seals feed off the urchins and clams, eating hundreds in a day, the community cannot survive without them. Without the seals, the urchins decimate the kelp and that destroys the environment, leaving nothing a wasteland where no animals can live. 

“There is a principal in ecology,” Sitwell began. He looked at Pierce. Pierce was watching him, his head tilted slightly to the side. He looked concerned. Sitwell continued, “of a so-called keystone species. Eliminate that one species from a community and everything changes.” 

Sitwell met Pierce’s eyes, his expression grim and determined. Pierce slowly smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for..the good he seeks.
> 
> _Mary Wollstonecraft_


End file.
